Janice A. Lowe is a composer and poet. She is the author of LEAVING CLE poems of nomadic dispersal and the chapbook SWAM. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, American Poetry Review, The Hat, In the Tradition, and The Poetry Project Online and are featured on a digital album with Drew Gardner’s Poetics Orchestra. She composed the musicals Lil Budda (text by Stephanie L. Jones), Sit-In at the Five & Dime (words by Marjorie Duffield), and Somewhere in Texas (book and lyrics by Charles E. Drew, Jr.). She is a co-founder of the Dark Room Collective and has performed with the experimental bands w/o a net, HAGL and Digital Diaspora.

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, LEADBELLY (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2005), was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005." His latest collection, OLIO, was just published by Wave Books. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004- 2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000-2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island. 

Alissa Quart’s first poetry book, Monetized (Miami University Press) was published last year. She is Executive Editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich. She is the author of three non-fiction books included Branded and Republic of Outsiders and numerous features and opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Elle, Vogue and many other publications and has produced video projects that have appeared in The Atavist and The Atlantic et al. Her poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Awl, Open City, Poetry Society of America, Columbia Journalism Review, Hanging Loose and a number of other magazines. She was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard and has taught non-fiction at Columbia University's Journalism School, SUNY New Paltz and elsewhere.